Tuesday, May 20, 2025

Part I

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Former President Biden Has Cancer - We are Praying for the Former President in Light of His Diagnosis

Yesterday, we talked about Joe Biden and the aging issue. And only after recording The Briefing did we hear the news that the former president has been diagnosed with prostate cancer, which has advanced and has metastasized to his bones. Clearly, this is an issue of personal emergency and of great consequence when it comes to the former president, and all Christians and people of goodwill will be praying for him and for his family and for his recovery.

Part II

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Why Is Travel Not Producing World Peace? Cosmopolitanism Isn't Bringing People Together

I am speaking to you today from Europe, and there are some fascinating issues that arise in the confrontation with different cultures, different political systems, clash of worldviews.

Very interestingly, Janan Ganesh, writing for the Financial Times of London, asked the question: “Why travel didn’t bring the world together?” It’s a very interesting question. In the background of this, we need to understand that in the modern age, and particularly in the Enlightenment, you had a new expectation for human society and for human moral behavior. You had a figure such as the key German philosopher, Immanuel Kant, who believed in a new age of cosmopolitan peace. He believed that reason properly applied by nations could lead to an enduring cosmopolitan peace. A universal peace. Of course, that has not happened. And we, as Christians, understand that it cannot happen in biblical terms. As much as we pray for peace, we understand that true peace will only be brought by the Prince of Peace when he returns. But even as we are to seek peace and to work for peace in this fallen world, we do understand that the natural arrangement of the world is not peace, but war. As the Scripture says itself, “Wars and rumors of wars.”

Janan Ganesh, a columnist, does ask an interesting question. Why didn’t travel bring the world together? And it’s a very interesting article. It’s occasioned by the increased conflict between India and Pakistan, two nuclear powers that was far more dangerous in terms of world peace than many would’ve recognized. And it’s not clear that that crisis has been passed. And so even as we’re concerned about what might happen there and their huge worldview issues involved in the conflict between India and Pakistan, the question that Ganesh is really raising is how is it that people who can now travel anywhere–and even in the last several years–just take the COVID period out–over the course of the last generation, far more people are traveling further in the world than ever before. If indeed there could be brought about some harmony among human beings and some cosmopolitan peace by engagement with what some would call “the other,” then travel would certainly add to that. So, there was the idea in the 20th century but it’s deeply rooted in the Enlightenment.

Go back to the 19th and to the 18th century, there was very much a confidence that if we could just get enough people to know other people, if we could just get enough people to experience other cultures, then peace would be the result. However, as this article in the Financial Times recognizes with lament, it turns out that travel hasn’t always led to peace. And furthermore, one of the things that’s proved in terms of human nature, is that it’s quite possible to go somewhere, and see amazing things and meet amazing people, and not want to be like them at all. And as a matter of fact, to define yourself over against what you have just seen in travel. One of the figures who has laid into the promise that travel or technology could bring people together is Mark Zuckerberg, who, like so many others of the emperors of Silicon Valley, gave the promise that social media and nearly infinite contact with the human population would lead to another way towards cosmopolitan universal peace.

Connect people. That’s one of the mottos of the 20th century, except it turns out the social media could be even more dangerous than profitable when it comes to thinking about cosmopolitan peace. Janan Ganesh writes, “Mark Zuckerberg’s belief that online contact would bring the world closer together.” That Zuckerberg’s term has dated laughably, but at least people say so. “It feels rude or almost transgressive,” he writes, “to point out that travel is also flopped as a uniter of the species.” “In Europe,” he writes, “it is still a midwit dinner party applause line that such and such a percentage of Americans don’t have passports.” I’ll just pause there and say many people in Europe laugh at Americans who are being very parochial. And evidently, the percentage of the population with passports is supposedly a key indicator. Ganesh continues, “Leaving aside the methodological problem here, the document wasn’t needed for some foreign trips until 2007. So, what?” He says “when 3%, that means of Americans, held valid passports, the US voted for George H.W. Bush, the old China hand and CIA man. The most outward-looking presidents. Now that nearing half of Americans have passports,” “Donald Trump is in the White House.” So much for the passport meeting this particular secular expectation for peace. And then Ganesh asked the question, “Why did travel fail?” 

He says, “The kindest answer is that other forces drove nationalism such as immigration, and that things would be even tenser now without the great increase in travel. Another is that most of the increase is accounted for by people who were liberal-minded to begin with. Those most in need of foreign exposure are still dodging it.” Now, he goes on to say he finds something plausible in all of those arguments. I’m actually going to leave his article at this point to say I find what’s most interesting is his question. And I think in a Christian worldview perspective, it is interesting. Why is it that knowing more about other cultures doesn’t necessarily lead to world peace? Why is it that travel around the world doesn’t necessarily make you more cosmopolitan?

I think one of the wake-up calls for America in this regard was the fact that we were absolutely confident that contact with American culture would make people admire and love America more. The terrorist attacks of September 11th, 2001 disproved that theory. And there were people, by the way, including many among the terrorists who were pretty deeply embedded in the goods of American culture, but they were willing to turn all of that against the United States in the terror attacks of September 11. But again, wake-up calls seemed to have a perish date on them. And so even as Americans seem to be newly aware of the fact that there are people who are not at peace with us in 2001, there is an American, a western liberal tendency to try to say, “Well, maybe if cosmopolitan peace wasn’t achievable in the past, it will be now. Or at least, soon over the horizon.”

When I read this article, I actually thought of Jesus in his contact with the woman at the well, and also with the parable of the Good Samaritan. Because the whole point of the parable is that it’s shocking that we are to like and extend love to people unlike ourselves. That’s not a natural human act. It’s an unnatural human act. Now by the way, it is to be one of the fruits of the gospel. It is to be actually driven by a gospel, Great Commission imperative. But the fact is that the state of the world left unto itself, is a state at war and conflict, and if there is a region not in war, it is threatened by war. And one of the interesting things raised by some of the philosophers of the 19th century is how to view history. Is it peace interrupted by war, or is it war interrupted by occasional peace? Those of us who are disciples of the Lord Jesus Christ, the Prince of Peace, understand how relevant that question is.

The author of this article raises a very interesting question. Why travel didn’t bring the world together or “why didn’t travel bring the world together?” But that reminds me of that question addressed to Jesus, “And who is my neighbor?” And we understand that in a fallen world, rare are the people who even asked that question.

Part III

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Global Peace Through International Law? No, Reason and Rules Are Not Enough to Bring Nations Together

Interestingly, a very similar question is asked in a British newspaper, The Guardian. That’s a very liberal British newspaper. The question is, is a Third World War upon us? Patrick Wintour is the author. And before that, the headline says, “The rule-based world order is in retreat and violence is on the rise, forcing countries to rethink their relationships.” Then the question, “is a Third World War upon us?”

Okay, this article goes back to limit the loss of what’s described here as a rule-based world order. And looking at so many things, certainly the conflict between India and Pakistan, looking at the conflict between Hamas and Israel, looking at some of the other conflicts around the world. And the fact that there are so many conflicts around the world, looking at the behavior of so many nations. And you could add to that the tensions between China and the United States, even in trade difficulties and tariff wars, and all the rest. The point I want to raise, is the question about that rules-based global order or rules-based world order. And I want to go back to another one of those cherished ideas of liberalism or progressivism in the late 19th and in the 20th centuries. And that is that a new world order could be created based on certain rules.

There are big milestones in terms of that effort. You have the Congress of Vienna, you have the Congress of Nations in the 19th century, then you had the League of Nations after World War I. The United States, by the way, didn’t join it even though President Woodrow Wilson was one of the central architects of the movement. He couldn’t even persuade the United States Senate to go along with him. You could look at the League of Nations after World War I, look at the United Nations after World War II. Look at efforts to try to bring about a global peace through a rules-based order. That’s what you have in so many treaties. That’s what you have in all these United Nations declarations. That’s what you have with what is often called international law. Now, there are some legal theorists who would state that the two words put together are an oxymoron. There’s actually no such thing as international law. The United States declares positively that there is such a thing as international law, but whatever it is, the United States insists that it often doesn’t apply to the United States of America. 

And so even as the key nation arguing for a rules-based global order at some points in the 20th century, the United States itself quickly determined that it didn’t want to put our national sovereignty in the hands of other nations that might have very different cultures, very different legal systems, very different expectations, and a very keen desire to undermine and subvert the legal system of the United States of America. And so, I want to look at this article and recognize that the author here in this article in The Guardian is asking a question that in one sense is quite interesting, but interesting because it’s dated. Because this really was the great quest of the 20th century, a rules-based order. And even before that, it’s a product of the Enlightenment. It’s the idea that reason can bring nations together.

If you just get nations around the table, if you just create a forum for arguing things out rather than fighting things out, then you would have harmony among nations. And even where there would be disagreement, the disagreement could be channeled into non-lethal means. By treaties, by agreements, all the rest. And I’m not going to go with the details in this article, I just want to say I think what we find very interesting here is the desire for this age of universal or cosmopolitan peace, and we understand there’s a rightful impulse behind that. We do yearn for that. I think we understand we are to be agents of peace as disciples of the Prince of Peace, wherever we can be. And we do believe in rules. As Christians, we do believe that there are rules. But we believe, as Christians, that behind those rules are moral truths, objective moral realities, which are moral realities because they’re established so by God and revealed in His Word. Which is to say, we don’t believe that human beings left to our own devices can come up with a rules-based order that is going to be righteous and just.

We’re not saying that rules can’t help. We’re not saying that treaties are never right and applicable. We are saying that the vision that somehow all conflicts can be adjudicated by those means, even as well-intentioned as many of those efforts are, they are absolutely doomed to eventual failure, which is what you see here. So even when you have different administrations in the United States declare commitment to the rules-based order, well, let me put it this way. There are many people right now who are making a very clear charge against President Donald Trump, that he is defying the rules of the rules-based order. Now, I’m not saying that that’s never true. I’m just saying that virtually, all presidents of the United States have, without saying it, demonstrated the very same judgment. The rules are applicable in the view of the sovereign United States of America where they are applicable.

This goes back, by the way, all the way to the formations, for example, of the United Nations. And in particular, the sponsorship of the United States and the effort to create the United Nations in the aftermath of the horrors of World War II. Franklin Delano Roosevelt was committed to the establishment of something like the United Nations. The hope of the Americans is to correct what we’re seeing as the structural errors of the League of Nations. And so the United States was very much behind the United Nations, but the United States hedged its bets in the 1940s in the creation of the United Nations. The first way it hedged its bets is that we believe in a rules-based order, but we’re not going to hand this over to the whole world. We’re going to create a security council of certain most responsible nations, which will have an absolute veto power over the General Assembly. Okay, that was the step number one. 

Step number two, as a rather insistent United States President Harry Truman said, “Wherever it is, it’s going to be where I can keep a close look on it.”And that meant that the plan to put the United Nations near San Francisco was changed to what became known as Turtle Bay, there as a part of Manhattan, because President Harry Truman was enough of a realist to know whatever that thing was, he didn’t want it far from the White House when the White House needed to act.

Part IV

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The Preconditions of an Ordered Society: Haiti is Lacking the Foundational Necessities of an Ordered Society And an The Problem Cannot Be Solved by Military Intervention

All right, following on a theme, a very interesting editorial statement just days ago from The Washington Post. Now, here’s an interesting little way of reading the news media that might be helpful. You have editorial opinion columns, and they usually have a name on them. And so The Washington Post, one of the most famous columnists is George Will. And so when The Washington Post runs a George Will column, one of their own official editorial columnists, that represents the opinion of George Will. When the editorial board releases a statement, that is a statement of the editorial position of the newspaper.

So with a paper like The Washington Post right there in the nation’s capitol with an outsized influence, this kind of editorial statement takes on a major significance. Okay, here’s the headline of the statement, “The US needs a plan to stop Haiti’s freefall.” The subhead in the article is, “Revoking protections for migrants and cutting aid does nothing to resolve the chaos on America’s doorstep.” The editorial board of The Washington Post went on to describe the complete devolution into chaos in Haiti, and it is an absolutely hellish depiction. Haiti is turning into an absolute picture of what happens when anarchy and lawlessness rules. And when, basically, criminal gangs are the only form of organization in the society. Certainly, only one that has any influence or force. And so we are told here that a Kenyan-led international security force was brought in to help restore order, but we’re told that it “remains undermanned and outgunned by the gangs.” “The spiral of chaos and violence has so deepened that ordinary citizens have been trying to take on the gangs themselves. Armed with machetes and sticks, protesters have been marching in Port-au-Prince against the ruling transitional council, which they accuse of being ineffective and corrupt.” So the bottom line is that the editorial board of The Washington Post is saying to the United States, “It is our responsibility to do something.” 

Now, I’m not saying that we have no national responsibility. I just want us to take apart that claim for a moment and understand there’s something deep here in worldview significance. That deeper thing is an understanding of how society becomes possible. And in a biblical Christian worldview, we understand there are some preconditions necessary for the emergence of a workable society. Those preconditions include, for example, respect among those who are a part of the community, a decision to live in peace and to live in order.

The Christian worldview, and indeed the entire biblical worldview, going back to Genesis 1 reminds us that a part of God’s creative act for his glory and for our good, is bringing creation out of chaos and order out of disorder. Society does, in one sense, produce an order. That’s one of the purposes of civilization, of culture, of society. It is to reinforce an order. But the point is, there has to be a pre-existing order that is sustained and enriched, respected and honored by a civilization. And that requires certain civilizational preconditions. And the point is that almost all of those preconditions do not exist in Haiti. The rule of law has never really had a firm hold in Haiti. And for that matter, certain social fundamentals including, say, a workable economy and a commitment to a workable economy. And that means stay to private property, and the right of investment, and a work ethic, and all of that. There are those who would say that such things should never be mentioned.

But we, as Christians, know that you can’t help people without telling them the truth, and the truth is that you can’t go in and solve a problem with soldiers when the problem returns as soon as the soldiers leave. There are preconditions. Interestingly, there’s a theological rubric to some of this that raises some interesting questions. For one thing, Haiti is the western portion of Hispaniola, which is an island, the other part of which is the Dominican Republic. The Dominican Republic has had its own unrest, but so has the United States for that matter, but the Dominican Republic is a functioning society. Now, the one thing you would say is in common when you look, for example, at Haiti. At least, in some form, Catholicism is thick on the ground. You would think of Haiti as a Catholic country. The Dominican Republic, there are a good, many wonderful evangelicals there, but the majority identifies in some sense as Roman Catholic. So, you say Roman Catholic and Roman Catholic.

But that’s not exactly true because you also have the overlay of the fact that in the age of empire and in the expansion of European powers, Haiti was an extension of France. And the Dominican Republic, remember, Dominican, that is itself a Catholic term. The Dominican Republic was an extension of Spain. What’s the difference in Catholicism between France and Spain? Spain is known for its rigor and its order. Just think 1492 Inquisition, Spain’s about order. France? Not so much. Now, let me be clear. I’m not saying that France in the age of empire had no concern for order. I’m just saying that it was nowhere near the structure of what was found in the legacy of Spain. And theology and culture have consequences.

One of the differences, by the way, if you’re trying to think about how this becomes concrete, is that the French understanding of Catholicism as represented in Haiti was far more open to syncretism than to Spain’s Catholicism. And so you have the emergence of different forms of what would be called voodoo, or other forms of spiritualism that were syncretized with Catholicism. On the issue of discipline and rigor, you’re going to find a difference in Spanish and in French Catholicism as you look over these centuries. That’s going to take a material form on the ground, and that’s going to have an impact in the culture. And that’s, at least in part, what we see. I’m not saying that you can draw a direct line from syncretism with Catholicism to the anarchy and the violence there in Haiti. I am saying that when it comes to the preconditions for civilization, order is always an achievement.

That comes to another biblical understanding. What is the natural state? We ask the question. What’s natural? War or peace? In a fallen world, what is natural? Order or disorder? No one looks at disorder and is surprised. No one looks at disorder and says, “How did that happen?” Rightly understood, you have to look at order and ask, “What was happening here? How was this achieved? What were the preconditions for this to exist? How can we have order rather than disorder? How can we have this rather than that?” That’s a fundamental question. Again, I don’t raise this article to say the United States has no responsibility. Frankly, this much volatility this close to the United States has always been a foreign policy concern of the United States. But the United States has intervened in Haiti many times before, and the situation seems to return to a basic disorder, and endangering to human life and to human goods almost as soon as the United States withdraws.

And by the way, the intervention of the United States in a situation like this is not without its own complications and moral challenges. It’s not without the danger that the very people we’re going to help will see our intervention as something very different. I am very much aware of the fact that as I speak this, I’m speaking these words in Geneva Switzerland, which is in so many ways, the epicenter in the world of those whose confidence is in a rules-based world order. You think of the United Nations. You think of all the international organizations that are located here. You think about the diplomatic community that is so thick here. You think about the secular context in which all of this is taking place. You think about the history of the Swiss Confederation and of Switzerland. You think about the history of all that has gone on here. You understand how many wars have come so close, even as Switzerland has famously sought peace as a nation. There’s a reminder that Switzerland can be at peace partly because others have been at war. And furthermore, Switzerland’s peace is a very well-armed peace. It’s a very realistic peace in understanding, once again, that peace is not the universal condition. Peace is an achievement.

Part V

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The Theological Foundation of a Rightly Ordered Society: Creation Order Must Be Established Before a Society Can Flourish

This is where Christians also have to remind ourselves that this order doesn’t begin naturally at, say, the global level. And you could say, “Well, then it begins more naturally at the national level.” That’s absolutely true. More naturally at the national level. But before that, we understand that there are realities that subside and are important and fundamental that are more basic than the nation. So, how far back do we have to go? This is where we go back to creation order. Where the very first order when it comes to human beings is the order of male and female. The order of a man and a woman coming together in marriage, and the order of them having children and that becoming a family. And the family being extended through kinship and then in community, and then it goes larger and larger.

But nothing is going to be healthy at the larger scene that isn’t healthy at the most basic unit. And this is something that just reminds us that the hope of the United Nations, and some of these international organizations, it’s not always, in any case, the wrong hope. It’s based, however, in so many ways upon a secular worldview that comes down to unreality. As Christians, we’re absolutely committed to reality, and we’re committed also to the moral realities of the most basic units of society that make human good and human flourishing possible. And so even as we look at these headlines and consider these stories, we are concerned with things international, but we can only be competent in dealing with things international if we deal rightly with things most basic.